by James Comey
When people see me, their first reaction is always to make note of my height. At six foot eight, I’m hard to miss. But when I was a kid, I was anything but imposing. In fact, when my parents moved us from Yonkers, New York, to Allendale, New Jersey, I was in the fifth grade and quickly went from being a popular kid to being a popular target for bullies.
From birth I had lived in a modest house, packed together with other modest houses, in Yonkers. Nearly all of my relatives were from Yonkers, a blue-collar city on the northern edge of the Bronx, one of the five boroughs of New York City. My great-grandparents were part of a wave of Irish immigration to the area in the late 1800s. My mother and father grew up blocks from each other on “the hill,” an Irish enclave in the northwest part of the city. My grandfather dropped out of school in the sixth grade to go to work to support his family after his father was killed in an industrial accident. He later became a police officer and rose to lead the Yonkers Police Department.
Our home was immediately behind Public School 16, the school where I happily spent my early childhood years. My mother had attended P.S. 16. One of my grandmother’s best friends was the principal. And by the time we moved, I was one of the most popular kids in my fifth-grade class.
Yonkers and School 16 were the center of my world. I could see the big red-brick school through the tall chain-link fence separating my backyard from the school playground. My older sister, two younger brothers, and I would walk to school every day, circling the block because the fence was too tall to climb. I knew everybody, and as far as I knew, everybody thought I was a pretty cool fifth grader. I fit in. I felt like I belonged somewhere. That was a great feeling. But it ended when my dad brought us news that changed my life.
My father, Brien Comey, worked for a big oil company. He started out selling cans of motor oil to gas station operators and moved up to finding locations for new stations. For decades afterward, he could drive around the New York metropolitan area and show you the corners he spotted, “his” gas stations. In the 1960s, both the car business and the gas business were booming.
When my dad took a new job with a company in northern New Jersey in 1971, it meant we had to move—to a place that, until then, had existed in my mind only as tall cliffs called the Palisades. Yonkers sits on the eastern bank of the mile-wide Hudson River. In the spaces between houses on my street, I could see the Palisades forming a dark stone wall on the western bank. I don’t think I ever believed the world ended at that formidable wall, because we had driven to Indiana once, but it might as well have. We were moving to the other side of the wall, where a new world awaited the coolest kid in the fifth grade at School 16.
I was not the coolest kid at my new school, Brookside Elementary, in Allendale, New Jersey, something I figured out pretty quickly. My parents were always trying to save money, so my mother cut her boys’ hair with her own electric clippers and dressed us in clothes she purchased at a Sears outlet. My pants were too short, and I wore white socks and heavy-soled black shoes to support the fallen arches in my huge feet. I didn’t know it, but it turns out I had a New York accent different from the kids in Allendale. I stuck out like a sore thumb.
The soreness quickly became more than metaphorical. One of my first days on the fifth-grade playground, I was surrounded by a group of boys who taunted me and my looks. I don’t remember what I said to them, but I probably said something, because I was a confident kid with a big mouth, even though I was not tough enough to back up what I said. They knocked me to the ground.
The bullies regularly invited their victims to fistfights staged after school in a nearby park. I was called out numerous times but never showed up, walking well out of my way to avoid the park. I remember one time attempting to reason with one of the bullies when he said he wanted to fight me. “If you don’t like me, and I don’t like you, and we then punch each other in the head with our fists, what will that change?” I asked. The reasoning approach only made him angrier. Maybe if I had let one of them pummel me they would have moved to another target, but I didn’t have the courage to try that.
Much of the next three years was spent avoiding the bullies. I absorbed their verbal taunts frequently, but I was keen to avoid physical confrontation. I just wasn’t tough or strong. So I kept to myself, played mostly with my two brothers, and walked odd, elliptical routes around town.
Allendale shared its high school with another town, so ninth grade offered the opportunity to meet bullies from a whole different municipality. Again, they found me quickly. I’m not entirely sure why. I wasn’t big—and wouldn’t be until after high school—but I was smart and verbal, which may have drawn their attention. Although I was trying out for football, I was also in the choir. Maybe because they were seen as artsy, or simply different, the choirboys seemed to be prime targets for abuse.
Unlike the tough boys at my high school, I still carried baby fat and was from the first day a prime target for taunts about my body. Being body-slammed into a locker hurt, but I could handle it; more dangerous were the “wedgies.” If memory serves, a wedgie involved ripping another boy’s underwear out of his pants by grabbing the rear waistband of his underwear and yanking upward. The offense typically involved two assailants, and I endured several in the ninth grade.
When the abuse began, I did nothing. I told no one. So it continued. Bullies would grab, pinch, and twist the skin on my chest or arm passing me in the hallway. Or if they couldn’t get close enough to pinch, they would throw a hard punch to the shoulder. I learned to see them coming and get out of the way.
So once again, I tried to avoid confrontation. This was harder to do in the locker room, dressing for gym or during the three weeks of my football career. I tried out for the football team, but after weeks of being battered (to the point where I severely bruised my coccyx—a part of my body that at that point was unknown to me) my mother finally had had enough. Without my knowledge, she walked across the street to Coach Murray and tendered my resignation. I was both humiliated and, secretly, relieved. My mother saw a truth I didn’t see, and she put it higher than worrying about my disappointment. I wasn’t tough enough yet to play football. Still, although my mother’s unilateral action may have saved my life, it didn’t stop the abuse from the other kids. I began to dress for gym in an empty locker room.
Those were hard times. But, thankfully, I had a couple of close friends, and adults I could look up to, people who reminded me that I mattered. Which is an easy thing to forget when you are a target for abuse. There were my parents, for starters. My parents were tough, but kind. They were report-card-on-the-refrigerator people, with the shakiest report card always seeming to be on top so your siblings could see it. They pushed us, but also constantly supported us. My mother, Joan, would snap the shades open in my bedroom nearly every morning with the same catchphrase—“Time to rise and shine and show the world what you’re made of.” When I became deputy attorney general decades later, my parents gave me a snow globe with the scales of justice inside and RISE & SHINE inscribed on the base. It still sits on my desk.
During high school, I would come home from school and sit with my mom to talk about my day; when she was dying from cancer in 2012 we spoke of those hours. Starting when I was a little boy, she told me much was expected of me. Before she died, my mother showed me a note I had written to her after getting sent to my room at the age of seven or eight. “I am sorry,” the note read. “I will be a great man someday.” She had saved it in her dresser for almost fifty years.
* * *
I also had some wonderful teachers, with whom I became close, especially English teacher Andy Dunn, the adviser to the school newspaper, where I was an aspiring journalist. Somehow, although I had a couple of good friends, I connected better with the teachers at my high school than the students.
And there was a man named Harry Howell.
During my junior and senior years of high school, I worked for Harry at a large grocery store near Allendale. I didn’t make much money st
ocking shelves, retrieving carts, and working the cash register, maybe four dollars an hour, but I loved my job. That was in large part due to the kind of leader he was.
Harry was a trim white guy of average height, with tightly cropped hair, who wore a white short-sleeved shirt most days with his nameplate pinned to the chest pocket. He wore a black belt and black, brightly shined wing-tip shoes, no matter what color his pants. As I see him in my memory, he bears a striking resemblance to a forty-five-year-old Robert Duvall.
Looking back, even after working for presidents and other prominent leaders in and outside government, I still think Harry Howell was one of the finest bosses I have ever had. This was in part because he loved his job and was proud of his work. Harry knew the grocery business, having worked his way up to store manager. He insisted his store be the cleanest, best-run in the entire corporate chain.
The stock clerks, most of us teenagers, were a group of amateur comedians. We laughed during our work, much of which was done after the store closed, played practical jokes, and worked like maniacs to make whatever aisle we were responsible for look perfect. All of that was Harry’s doing. Somehow, he created an environment that was both demanding and incredibly fun. He suppressed a smile at our silliness—just letting the corner of his mouth turn up slightly so we could see his amusement—and told us bluntly when our work wasn’t good enough. We loved him. But we also feared him, in a healthy way. Because he made us feel important, because he so obviously cared about what he was doing and about us, we desperately wanted to please him. Harry Howell made me love the look and feel of a grocery store aisle that has been expertly “blocked”—or “faced,” as some stores called it—with each can or package pulled forward to the shelf edge so the aisle looks clean and undisturbed to the customers, as if they are the first humans to find it.
In pre-bar-code days, we used handheld ink stamps to put prices on items sold in the store. This was a slow process that required great attention to setting the correct price on the stamping device. A pricing error would be tattooed in ink, forever.
During my stint at the store, the company invested in new “technology”—hard plastic label “guns” to put price stickers on items. We only had two or three of these prototype label guns because, we were told, they were very expensive. They were to be treated with extreme care.
One evening, I was busy with my specialty, stocking the paper aisle—paper towels, toilet paper, tissues, napkins. I was about one-third of the way up the aisle from the front of the store, cutting boxes open with my razor and using the fancy label gun to hit each item before filling the shelf. I was a blur of stocking excellence. Then I heard the voice of one of my fellow stockers, standing at the end of my aisle. With urgency, he called, “Comey, lemme borrow the gun. I just need it for a second,” and he extended both hands in front of his body to catch the gun. Without thinking, I tossed it.
The moment the gun left my hand, he turned quickly and disappeared. I can still see the expensive prototype label gun arcing through the air; in my mind, it is rotating backward, end-over-end, as it slowly flies the twenty or thirty feet to the spot where my coworker no longer stood. In my memory, I am crying “noooooo” in slow motion, but I doubt I had time to do that before that expensive gun landed at the feet of Harry Howell, who had conveniently stepped into my aisle. The gun smashed into pieces. My coworker had seen him coming and timed it perfectly.
There are many leaders, and I’ve known a few in my life, who would have lost it, hurling expletives and accusations at a stupid kid. As Harry looked down at the plastic parts now spread around his wing-tip shoes, he said only, “Clean it up,” and walked away. I don’t remember him asking for an explanation or mentioning it again. My sixteen-year-old self concluded that Harry immediately realized I had been scammed; in his stoic, suppressed-smile way, he understood that I’d been the victim of a slightly mean prank and pitied me.
Maybe the guns really weren’t expensive, or maybe Harry made my coworker pay for the one that I tossed. But Harry’s grant of mercy left a lasting impression and made me love him more. I worked even harder, making the paper aisle a Bounty-filled paradise. And I tested him again.
One evening, I was assigned to stock the dairy case, which was a level of complexity far beyond paper. This was the big leagues. I pulled open the huge door to the dairy cooler in the far rear of the building to retrieve gallons of milk. They stood in tall stacks, four gallons to a plastic crate. In the days before plastic milk bottles, these were made of paper and looked like gigantic versions of the box of milk you bought with your school lunch. I grabbed a hand truck and began loading it with crates. Overconfident rookie that I was, I made it a big stack of six crates—holding twenty-four gallons of milk. My mother would have called it a “lazy man’s load.” I tilted the two-wheeled hand truck back, noting the impressive weight, and made my way out of the cooler, pushing my right shoulder into the back of the hand truck, left hand on top of the stack. I banged through the swinging back-room doors and rolled along the dairy display cases. The weight was making me go faster and faster, so I took quick steps to keep the stack from falling back on me. At the milk display case, I stopped abruptly and pushed the hand truck hard upright, heedless of the basic laws of physics. The universe and the milk, of course, were not heedless.
When I stopped short and heaved the hand truck upright, the crates kept going, momentum conserved, and fell like a towering tree in the very direction I had been pushing them before I stopped short. The tree of plastic crates hit the floor, hard. Instantly, the tops of those paper gallons burst open in unison, dumping more milk in one place than I had ever seen before. A twenty-four-gallon lake of milk began spreading along the dairy case and down the cereal, canned goods, and international foods aisles. It was a catastrophe beyond words.
I ran to the back, grabbed a mop and bucket, and began frantically soaking up Lake Milk and squeezing the mop with the mechanism on top of the bucket. It had all been so quiet. Paper milk gallons don’t shatter. They just open. If I hurry, I thought, I might get this cleaned up before anyone sees the mess.
I was minutes into mopping when Harry appeared. He stood on the far side of Lake Milk, hands on hips, careful not to get any on his wing tips. After an eternity of admiring the lake, he asked, “Have you learned something?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“Good,” he answered. “Clean it all up.” And he walked away.
I was too young to see it clearly, but, at sixteen, I was getting a look at great leadership. I knew I wanted to be more like Harry than the kids who tormented me on the playground. And maybe Harry was open enough to see that about me. Maybe he even instinctively knew what school was like for me, that I was a kid just trying to fit in somewhere and be something.
Being an outsider, being picked on, was very painful, but in hindsight it made me a better judge of people. In my life I would spend a lot of time assessing threats, judging tone of voice, and figuring out the shifting dynamic in a hallway or locker room crowd. Surviving a bully requires constant learning and adaptation. Which is why bullies are so powerful, because it’s so much easier to be a follower, to go with the crowd, to just blend in.
Those years of bullying added up, minor indignity after indignity, making clear the consequences of power. Harry Howell had power, and he wielded it with compassion and understanding. That wasn’t always easy for him, because he had to deal with a lot of immature kids. Others had power, like the bullies at school, and they found it far easier to wield it against those who were defenseless and to just go along with the group rather than stand up to it.
I learned this lesson, too, in one of the great early mistakes of my life.
* * *
In 1978, I attended the College of William & Mary. I was one of many insecure, homesick, frightened kids living away from home for the first time, although we would admit none of that to one another, or even to ourselves. Because of overcrowding, I was among seventeen freshman boys living in
a physically separate annex to one of the large dormitories, without a resident advisor or any kind of on-site supervision. I shudder looking back through the lens of adulthood; my college had unintentionally created a Lord of the Flies dormitory annex.
There was a boy in that annex who was mildly annoying. He was a bit arrogant and uptight, and had a hometown girlfriend he talked about constantly. He had potted plants in his immaculately neat dorm room. He went his own way most of the time. But somehow the group of boys decided that this mildly annoying boy was not to be tolerated. So the group messed with his belongings, trashed his room, recorded voices over portions of his favorite cassette tapes, and performed other idiocies I can’t remember. I was part of that group. Some things I did, some things I helped do, some things I laughed about after they were done. I caused someone else pain.
Four decades later, I’m still ashamed of myself. How on earth could I be part of bullying another boy? But I was. After all, everyone was doing it. Maybe I was afraid that if I didn’t go along with this, I’d be the new target. Or maybe it was because I’d spent so many years on the outside of the group that I wanted in. I was one of the guys. Finally, I belonged.
I was raised by parents who constantly emphasized the importance of resisting the group. A thousand times, in many contexts, my mother said, “If everyone is lined up to jump off the George Washington Bridge, are you just going to get in line?” I gave a speech at my high school graduation about the evils of peer pressure. I carried in my wallet from the age of sixteen a quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” (I just typed that without looking it up.)
Despite all that training, all that reflection, and in the face of whatever guilt or hesitation I felt, I surrendered to the loud laughter and the camaraderie of the group and maybe to a feeling of relief that I wasn’t the target. I harassed and bullied another boy, who wasn’t very different from me. I was a timid hypocrite and a fool.
